Far from being an anomaly, black women play extremely important roles in a variety of rock acts. This includes a number of metal acts. Here are five more ladies who shred and scream in metal bands. This is a continuation of the Metal series. Part 1 is here, and Part 2 is here.

Dana James (Helms Alee): Dana James plays bass for this stoner/sludge inspired metal band Helms Alee. High-quality music, recommended if you like laid-back metal like Torche and Baroness. Bandcamp page: https://helmsalee.bandcamp.com/

Goldgrrl (Erzulie): Lead vocalist for Chicago-based metal band Erzulie and an all-around awesome person. Their sound is reminiscent of Plasmatics-esque punk metal. Facebook page: https://www.facebook.com/ErzulieBand/

I get really frustrated at the lack of black women in metal, hardcore, rock (and other such genres). Do we not have a place in music unless its for us to shake our asses and flash our tits. On a side note I dont think Straight Line Stitch has been mentioned at all (I could be wrong). An amazing band fronted by a kick ass black chick whose singing and screaming can outdo any man!

(Straight Line Stitch has been mentioned a couple of times and Alexis separately too, check out the tag if you’re interested 🙂 )

It’s really more of a lack of representation than a lack of women. No one is really going to push a black woman out into mainstream media that doesn’t serve conventional narratives about who and what black women are because it doesn’t serve the status quo. No matter how talented the women involved actually are, you’re not going to hear about them. You have black women playing every instrument in bands like these, black women fronting these bands, but because of the lack of representation no one knows about these women and everyone thinks that we’re just not out here, or that there’s just one or two who do this sort of thing. It’s the way I used to think.

Hence the reason my blog came to be. I had an obsessive need to collect every woman related to rock music that I could find in one place just to prove that there’s isn’t just one or two of us out here, and so far (with a lot of help!) I’ve been incredibly successful. It’s up to us to represent ourselves.

Reminding myself to tag this post specifically with all of the women I’ve found related to metal and hardcore/punk, which is a fraction of the black women I’ve found that do general rock music as a whole.